


There is Great Beauty in Broken Things

by LozaMoza



Series: Moments [12]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: BAMF Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Canon Compliant, F/M, Family, Fix-It of Sorts, One Shot, Regret, Soft Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Soft Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, because Geralt and Yennefer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:53:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25796179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LozaMoza/pseuds/LozaMoza
Summary: This fic was basically born with a desire for me to fix some things in canon, as I am known to do! It's hugely frustrating that Geralt and Yennefer never discuss what happened to each of them in Ebbing as they travel on Ciri's tour of redemption. Both had been so hurt, I wanted to give them a moment to talk to each other and find comfort there. They deserve it.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: Moments [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1806943
Comments: 22
Kudos: 62





	There is Great Beauty in Broken Things

**Author's Note:**

> This deals with some real canon lore (Ciri fighting in the arena on fisstech, Yennefer fighting off Bonhart with a damn fork-I love her) and some fake things, like my story about Rachard. He's completely made up.

**Geralt**

The campfire hissed and spat as Geralt threw another log on the flame, sending out a shower of gold and red sparks in retaliation. The sound of the wood splintering in the flames could at other times be called pleasant, but at this moment, it sounded like a wailing scream, each small pop reverberating throughout the trunks of the trees and filling the night air.

Besides the fire, they sat in an eerie and oppressing silence. 

Though none would speak aloud, Geralt’s mind was a torrent of sound.  _ Did they even know each other anymore? How many years had it been since he’d seen Yen? Seen Ciri? Yennefer’s mangled hands, the scar across Ciri’s cheek. What kind of horrors had they born witness to? _

The meal they shared had been sparse, though none had much of an appetite anyway. Geralt had managed to catch a few small fish in a nearby stream while Yennefer had discovered a small patch of wild carrots. It filled their bellies at the very least. Geralt looked over to the pan with a few carrots remaining. “Anyone care to finish these?”

The noise made both Yennefer and Ciri jump slightly. 

“I’m fine,” whispered Yennefer, while Ciri simply shook her head. Geralt groaned. 

It had been one week since Stygga. One week since the desecration of his hanse. Their deaths seemed so pointlessly arbitrary: Milva and another archer had simultaneously killed each other with fatal shots, Bonhart had butchered down Cahir, Angoulême died from blood loss in Ciri’s arms, and Regis had been melted against a pillar with a blast of magic from Vilgefortz. They were all beneath Stygga now; not one even surviving long enough to see Geralt and Ciri reunited. 

Every night, he mourned them. He wished that he would have been able to thank them once more. 

Ciri stood suddenly. “I need to ride,” she stated. With hardly a glance, she leapt onto her wild mare Kepie.

“Ciri, I…” but she was gone, the black horse galloping into the moonless night.

“Let her go, Geralt. She’ll be back soon enough. It is...difficult...sitting with this.” Yennefer slowly stood, putting her hands to the small of her back to stretch lightly, and Geralt closed his eyes for a moment, letting the shame wash over him once again, like a neverending tide. When he opened them, she was bending to pick up the cooking pot when her hand suddenly seized. She winced in obvious pain, pulling it back just an inch while her fingers twitched slightly. 

Geralt took a sharp intake of breath. A roiling hatred coursed through his veins, making the hairs on his arms stand up and his pupils widen. He hated Vilgefortz. If he could bring the bastard to life to kill again he’d gladly do so. He hated the Lodge for hiding the truth from him, for allowing him to believe that Yennefer had betrayed him. But most of all, he hated himself for believing it anyway; for being so fucking weak he actually accepted Yennefer would do this to them both, after everything. And while she was being tortured and maimed, he was…

He was betraying her all along. The hatred stampeding through his veins faded as quickly as it had arrived, leaving a shell of grey shame in its wake.

“Let me see them,” he said softly.

She turned, immediately hiding her hands behind her back. “No.”

“Yen,” he said even more gently, “please.” He held out his own hands, cupping them together.

She eyed him wearily for a time, searching his face for any signs of pity - she would find none, he would never be so asinine as to pity Yennefer of Vengerberg - then sighed heavily and placed her hands in his. Geralt turned his eyes downward to stare at them and she immediately tried to pull them back, but he tightened his grip gently, stopping her movement. “Yen,” he whispered. She relented once more. 

Her hands, it was quite obvious, had been brutalized. Geralt had to bite the inside of his mouth to keep his fury at bay. Her fingers were curled in on themselves, the smallest two still twitching lightly. The others, while somewhat healed, looked stiff. He turned her palms over, the smooth skin of the top of her hands still unchanged. 

“I didn’t have my magic,” she said quietly. “Had I had use of my magic I could have healed them properly.”

Geralt pulled her hands to his mouth, and slowly, carefully, kissed each finger on both. He heard Yennefer stifle a small sob as a single tear fell down her left cheek, highlighted by the firelight. He brought them back down, placing her right hand on her lap while keeping her left in his own. Slowly, with the greatest of care, he began to uncurl her fingers. 

“Promise me you’ll tell me when this is too much, Yen. I can’t read minds like you.”

“What are you doing?” she said, her bottom lip quivering. 

“Trust me,” he said with a small grin. He placed his thumb on the inner pads of her palm, his forefingers on the back of her hand, and began to rub small circles into her skin. He varied pressure and movement, focusing on the joints in the palm and wrists before moving to massage each finger, gently pulling on the joints, trying to loosen them. Yennefer simply closed her eyes, relaxing into the massage.

“In Kaer Morhen, as a child, at times we would train until our hands would cramp into nothing more than claws. We would cry in the night under our thin blankets, our hands seizing so terribly we couldn’t sleep. It was an older boy, Rachard, whose father had been a doctor, who taught us this hand massage trick. It saved many of us from the lashes that would be handed out if we couldn’t complete a day’s training.” He was quiet for a moment, thinking of that boy with those wide brown eyes and messy black hair. He had been a friend and mentor to Geralt when he needed one the most, having just been left by Visenna. Geralt had turned to Rachard like a younger brother would.

Yennefer hmmed softly as she fluttered her eyes open. “Sounds like he helped take care of all of you.”

Geralt smiled a joyless smile. “He did, but the Trials claimed him in the end.” Another pointlessly arbitrary death.

Yennefer stared at him for a long moment before gently pulling her hand away from his and cupping his cheek with it. “I’m so sorry, Geralt,” she whispered. He knew she was talking about far more than Rachard. She leaned into him and softly kissed his cheekbone. He cupped the side of her jaw and pulled her forehead to his, the touch of her cool skin alighting his body as it always had. And so they breathed in time together, sharing in each other’s pain and lightening the burden for them both. 

They stayed that way for a long time

*******

After what seemed like an age, he picked up her other hand and began to massage it as well. “Yen,” he said once more. “I’m worried about Ciri. She hardly speaks; her eyes are vacant. And that scar.”

“She’s not the girl we knew,” Yennefer said in a hollow voice. He could hear the words, tinged in pain and regret and bottomless guilt. He knew she still blamed herself for what happened to Ciri, as he blamed himself for what happened to them both. “When I was….” she paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts, “away...I learned some of the things she was forced to endure from that evil son-of-a-bitch Bonhart.”

Geralt looked up at her quickly.  _ Why would Bonhart tell her this? How was he even by her? _ “How did you learn this?”

“It does not bear repeating, Geralt. Suffice to say, Ciri was forced to sword fight in the arena while strung out on fisstech, and we can assume this is just one of the many horrors that had been thrust upon her since that cursed coup at Thanedd. There are far deeper scars within her than the one that graces her cheek.”

He was silent.  _ Strung out on fisstech? Forced to kill for the sport of others? How much worse could the story go? _ He was afraid he already knew the answer. “What do we do?”

“We love her. We support her. We give her time. I don’t know if there is anything else we can do, desperate as I may be to turn back the hands of time, that simply isn’t an option for all of us.”

“What if she never recovers?” he said.

“I don’t know if any of us will ever truly recover, Geralt.” She looked at him softly. “But whatever has happened, whatever else may happen, at this moment we are together, and that is something to be grateful for, is it not?”

He looked her in the eyes, the most beautiful eyes in the world, and knew she was correct. 

“Tell me how you found this out, Yen. I need to know,” he said again.

“You don’t want to know, Geralt.”

“You’re correct, I don’t want to know, but I need to. Please.”

She let a long breath out. “He tried to rape me.”

Immediately the rage whipped through him like a wildfire, consuming his every thought. He cursed the fact he couldn’t butcher Bonhart alive as well, that the cur was already dead amongst the fallen rafters in Stygga. “Did he....,” Geralt couldn’t complete the thought.

“No, Yennefer stated as he stopped massaging her hand. His own were shaking far too hard. Ciri and Yennefer, both brutalized by this one man. “I stabbed in the face with a fork.”

That stopped him. He let out an involuntary laugh. “You what? How?”

“Vilgefortz enjoyed trying to make a mockery of me on a regular basis with fine dinners and meals in which he knew I couldn’t properly hold cutlery. After one such event, I smuggled a fork to the cell I was in.” Geralt winced at the word cell. “When Bonhart came to me, boasting about his tortures with Ciri and that he was a better man than you in every way, he did not take kindly to my mocking replies. Unfortunately for him, he attacked me without realizing I was armed with shackles and the sharp tines of my illicit weapon. The prick wailed like a beaten dog, scampering to the corner with a swollen cock and fork sticking out of his cheek. My only regret is that I missed his damn eye. But, no one’s perfect.”

Geralt listened in awe. This woman he loved, she was something else entirely. “I love you, Yen,” he finally managed to say.

“And I love you, Geralt.” He leaned in and kissed her, harder this time, her mouth parting slightly to allow him to explore hers more fully. He pulled her close to him, deepening the kiss until he was forced to come up for air. 

“A fucking fork,” he smiled once again as he pulled her to his chest. She snuggled deeper into his embrace. 

“No one touches me unless I allow them to do so. I hope that pathetic little dogcatcher is burning in the pits of hell.”

“I am almost certain he is, if there is any semblance of justice in this world.”

“I think there is. At least it’s a prettier picture to believe that not, isn’t it?”

He thought of his friends, so many lost in his life, and smiled. “Yes, I believe you’re right, Yen.”

“My hands, they feel so much better already, Geralt.” She was quiet for a moment, fighting a yawn. “Thank you.”

“Anything for you, Yen.”

The fire, at first sounding like the scream of a wretched beast, now lulled the both to sleep with its soft pops and hisses. 

**Ciri**

She came back to find her parents sleeping, Geralt’s arms wrapped around Yennefer, her cheek nestled against his chest. She would let them sleep, she decided, and tomorrow, she would tell them of her plan. She had much to make up for, many errors to correct, but they could wait for the dawning sun.  _ Let them sleep _ , she thought. _ They look so beautiful together.  _

_ Whole. _

**Author's Note:**

> sniff...I love soft Geralt and Yen.
> 
> Comments and kudos are so appreciated, and thank you for taking time to read this story. I hope you enjoyed it.


End file.
